His mother. His best friend. The barmaid at the local pub. Everyone is determined to find Nathan Moffatt a boyfriend. It’s the last thing Nathan wants. After spending every day making sure his clients experience nothing but romantic magic, the Granshire Hotel’s wedding organizer just wants to go home, binge watch crime dramas, and eat pizza in his underwear.

Unfortunately, no one believes him, and he’s stuck with lectures about dying alone. Then inspiration strikes. He needs the people in his life to want him to stay single as much as he does. He needs a bad boyfriend.

There’s only one man for the job.

Flynn Delaney is used to people on the island of Ceremony thinking the worst of him. But he isn’t sure he wants the dubious honor of worst boyfriend on the entire island. On the other hand, if he plays along, he gets to hang out with the gorgeous Nathan and piss off the owners of the Granshire Hotel. It’s a win-win.

There’s only one problem—Flynn’s actually quite a good boyfriend, and now Nathan’s wondering if getting off the sofa occasionally is really the worst thing in the world.

Sometimes you read the first page of a book and you immediately know the book isn’t for you. That happened to me here. The writing style instantly confused me and I don’t like not knowing what’s going on and that I have to guess where we are and what people are doing.

The premise of this story sounded so interesting, but it was like it was a completely different book than what the blurb said. There was almost no fake boyfriend thing going on and this was most definitely not a funny book (as I would have expected after reading the synopsis).

I hope my review is going to make sense because there were a lot of things of this book I just didn’t get. I was mostly confused for this entire book and had no idea why people acted the way they did, or even what was going on.

What I expected was a cute, perhaps a bit funny, fake boyfriend story about a bad boy who was not a bad boy at all. But that wasn’t quite what I got.

I thought it was pretty strange that Nate just shows up at Flynn’s doorstep and asks him to be his bad boyfriend. There were no introductions or anything, and I didn’t get the feeling they actually knew each other before that encounter. But they acted like they knew each other for years and were just shooting the shit. It was weird.

After that there wasn’t a lot of faking going on. Nate and Flynn kept bumping into each other and they kissed and then had sex. Meanwhile Nate is telling people Flynn is his boyfriend and everyone reacts hateful. Except Nate’s mom, she was awesome.

While all of this is happening we get to go on several rescue missions with Flynn and we get to be there for the wedding Nate is planning. We get to be there for the planning, the rehearsal dinner, everything. It was boring and completely irrelevant to the story, but okay..

We also have Max’s father, Nate’s boss, as some kind of villain in the background, but I’m not sure that did the story any good.

What really stood out to me was that there was only one likable character in this, and that was Nate’s mom. She was sweet, but fierce. I really liked her. But that was it. Nate himself was a terribly depressing person, and I disliked him instantly. Oh, and did I mention he smoked? I can do smoking MCs fine, if it’s a dark and gritty book, or if the main character is depressed or dealing with some kind of trauma, but not a ‘regular’ MC. I know I’m probably nitpicking, but I already didn’t like him, so the smoking was just another thing against him.

Flynn was a weird character. (Oh, what am I saying, they were all weird!) The whole island was against Flynn and I never got why. There were the most crazy rumors going on about him and everyone seemed to really believe in them. And for some reason Nate, Flynn, and Flynn’s mother, were fine with that. I mean, why would they even live in a place like that, where people treat you like shit for no reason.

Flynn was supposed to be the island’s bad boy, but why? No idea…

And then we get to Max, Nate’s best friend. I hated him. Like really really hated him. He held a grudge against Flynn because Flynn called Max’s father when Max was 15 and Flynn 20, and Max snuck into a club. Because yes, that makes so much sense 20 years later.

The writing in this was too confusing for me. Most of the time I had no idea what was going on. People were mentioned while I had no idea who they were supposed to be. It took 60% for me to figure out that Max’s father was Nate’s boss and that he apparently had something to do with Flynn 20 years ago.

So overall what bothered me the most was that all these people were just so darn unlikable. Add the writing style that just wasn’t for me and we got…. book soup.